By breathing life into scattered clues and dry facts, and with a deep understanding of the times and places through which Madam Walker moved, tells a story that stretches from the antebellum South to the Harlem Renaissance and bridges nearly a century of our history in her search for the distant truths of a woman who defied all odds and redefined conventional expectations. Annotation. Lowry (creative nonfiction, George Mason U.) tells how a child born in a sharecropper's cabin to former slaves invented a hair- care product for African-American women, sold it successfully in a city she had just moved to, turned her little business into an empire, renovated a Harlem townhouse, filled it with treasures, and entertained there the most influential figures of her time.